The one lesson Republicans probably will not learn from Ken Cuccinelli’s troubled campaign for Virginia governor is the most important: Politically, the “truce strategy” on abortion fails. If it is not abandoned, it will drag down the GOP.

Democratic charges of a Republican “war on women” are predicated on the GOP’s self-imposed truce on social issues: Republican candidates pledge not to run ads on topics such as abortion. When social subjects arise, GOP candidates go mute, retreat and change the subject. . . .

Rod Dreher had a thoughtful article at The American Conservative that quotes Maggie. An excerpt:

This summer’s Windsor decision from the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, but it did not declare a constitutional right to gay marriage. Yet even Maggie Gallagher, the country’s most tireless and high-profile opponent of same-sex marriage, now believessuch an outcome is a foregone conclusion.

“It’s clear that the courts are going to shut down the marriage debate and impose gay marriage uniformly,” she says. “There is not yet a unified sense of where we go from here, except for this: there is an accelerating awareness that the consequence of marriage equality is going to be extremely negative for traditionalist Christians.”

…To gay marriage supporters, homosexuality is, like race, a morally neutral condition. Opponents disagree, believing that because homosexuality, like heterosexuality, has to do with behavior, it cannot be separated from moral reflection. As Gallagher put it in a 2010 paper in Northwestern University’s law journal, “Skin color does not give rise to a morality.”Read More…